![[Ire]](/static/img/flags/ire.png "Ireland")
(con. 1920s) Dublin Tenement Life 69: Local people didn’t mind the madams. And they were the best in the world for helping the poor [...] Now May Oblong, she’d see you down-and-out and she’d help you.at down-and-out, adj.
(con. 1920s) Dublin Tenement Life 69: Local people didn’t mind the madams. And they were the best in the world for helping the poor [...] Now May Oblong, she’d see you down-and-out and she’d help you. (con. 1920s) Dublin Tenement Life 70: They’d be drinking there all night and they’d get their back-hand then the next morning.at back-hander, n.
(con. 1920s) Dublin Tenement Life 119: A good shawl, a big brown shawl was called a ‘teddy bear.’ My mother had one of them.at teddy bear, n.2
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 143: I had an ointment that was famous all over the city for women with an itch, as they say, ‘down below’.at down below, n.1
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 198: He was a kind of a bowsy.at bowsie, n.
(con. 1930s–40s) Dublin Tenement Life 116: He gave me the baby – and I’ll never forget it – he said, ‘Give it a few clappers on the bottom’.at clapper, n.3
(con. 1920s) Dublin Tenement Life 46: When May Hanaphy and one of her pals went clicking back in the 1920s it was a perfectly proper way to meet a prospective husband: ‘Oh, clicking then was very popular. See, that’s how flirting went on [...] We’d go clicking along mostly O’Connell Street or maybe down Henry Street, you know, slow walking ... strolling, and two fellas’d come along and say ‘there’s two mots’.’.at click, v.3
(con. 1920s) Dublin Tenement Life 185: And clocks running around. Did you ever see a clock? Big black, hard things and little legs. Me mother’d be killing them with hammers.at clock, n.2
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 199: Oh, the hair stood up on me head and the sweat run out of me! Frightened the living daylights out of me.at frighten the (living) daylights out of (v.) under daylights, n.
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 199: I was sitting up with Banker on the front, on the dickey.at dicky, n.3
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 201: You’d get a man’s long drawers and filled it full of hay and got a carrot and stuck it out as his dickey. Just a bit of a joke.at dicky, n.5
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 32: The most popular means by which tenement women saved money for Christmas was the ‘diddley club’. [...] ‘My mother was always in the diddley. My aunt ran one. It was for saving the money, before credit unions.’.at diddly, n.1
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 44: In the vernacular of the tenements an unfaithful husband would have a ‘fancy woman’, or the wife a ‘fancy man’.at fancy man, n.1
(con. 1940s–50s) Dublin Tenement Life 181: This is how I got my bad eye, very gabby eye.at gabby, adj.
(con. 1940s) Dublin Tenement Life 158: They were a mixture of country girls and Dublin girls, generally uneducated girls, who might have been exploited by her employer. Then they’d ‘go on the game’.at on the game under game, n.
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 70: They’d let down a can with a string on it and money’d be in the can to get cigarettes and matches or get them a gargle at the pub.at gargle, n.
(con. 1940s) Dublin Tenement Life 165: The teacher [...] was a very important person in their lives. They looked on you as a surrogate parent, a confessor, you ‘gave out’ to them, you corrected them.at give out, v.
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 47: And the groom would throw out a few coppers in a brown bag to the kids, Ha’pennies and pennies. Oh, Yeah, that was called the ‘grushie’.at grush, v.
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 186: And there was a woman, a hard ticket, a stuffy-nosed old thing – and we were such a poor gang –and she’d a young one going to private school.at hard ticket (n.) under hard, adj.
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 220: Mother died up to the last minute working ... she died in harness.at in harness under harness, n.
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 124: See, on the penny there was a head on one side and a harp on the other and they’d be tossing that. It was ‘heads you win, harps you lose’.at harp, n.1
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 180: And it ended up with a hooley. And I always remember what a lovely hooley it was.at hooley, n.
(con. 1920–30s) Dublin Tenement Life 61: Sure, the bed was loaded with bugs and hoppers and you’d be scratching yourself.at hopper, n.2
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 97: There was a man and he used to have a short leg and we used to call him ‘Hoppy’ Gaynor.at hoppy, n.2
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 31: The local ‘Jewman’ (the term always used by the tenement population but not in any derogatory manner) who loaned money were seen as shrewd but fair. [Ibid.] 32: Oh, my mother had a Jewman, we couldn’t do without them [...] In them days your first loan off a Jewman would be two or three pounds and you paid it back at a half a crown a week.at Jewman, n.
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 128: Now I done four days in the ‘Joy’ (Mountjoy) over the licence – I wouldn’t pay the five shillings for the licence.at Joy, the, n.
(con. 1920s–30s) Dublin Tenement Life 210: Now we didn’t call them ‘madams’, the outsiders called them madams. We called them ‘kip-keepers’ [...] Like my mother used to say, ‘Oh, she’s a kip-keeper’ and that was an awful thing. Very rarely you’d hear of a ‘brothel’, it was a ‘kip’.at kip, n.1
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 54: Numerous brothels – or ‘kip houses’ as they were then known – were found around North King Street.at kiphouse (n.) under kip, n.1
(con. 1930s) Dublin Tenement Life 166: Knockabouts would come into the halls and sleep on the stairs and all the tenants would bring them out a cup of tea in the morning.at knockabout, n.
(con. 1940s) Dublin Tenement Life 157: There were two ordinary cards and a queen. The idea was to find the ‘Lady’.at lady, n.
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